Tag Archives: Family

I prefer au revoir not goodbye

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January 2017, Washington, DC
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The only person I consistently write about here is Pat. There’s an archive of Pat stories and reflections. Pat was my mom.

In the tapestry of all of the relationships, if Pat was once my center, directly adjacent was her sister, Nancy. Anne L. is her actual name, and for my whole life, and I guess her whole life, she flipped between the names Nancy and Anne, Anne and Nancy. For the family, it was Nancy.

Then, Nancy got married. Pretty sure it was 1970, but being around 5 or 6 years old, I may not be the best chronicler. From then on, there was another name change. The family ran everything together — NancyandRon.

I feel like it was every Friday night, but maybe it was Sunday. Let’s say every weekend. For every week of of my life as a kid, Nancy and then NancyandRon came over our house for a meal. During the week there was more often than not other visits and activities and meals and all sorts of things. My childhood memories all include them alongside Pat and my brothers and sister.

I can’t for the life of me figure out one memory in line with the historical record. A thing that never happens when you are the youngest of five kids happened. I got adult attention all to myself, and NancyandRon took me into the city of Boston to see the movie Doctor Doolittle.

If you had a gun to my head, I would swear the year was 1972, and I’d also claim that after the movie they took me to the Museum of Science, walked me through an exhibit on reproduction, explained all the things no one had ever told me about babies, and then shared the news that my cousin Ted was on his way.

Only thing is Doctor Doolittle came out in 1967. Back in ’67, my own father would have still been alive. I would have been only three.

The important part is Nancy did indeed tell me where babies come from. Nancy equipped me with so many things everyone needs to know. In my childhood, she was a colossus. She was a second mother. She was just so many things.

Pat had gaps in parenting. And, Pat’s precocious youngest child — the one clicking on a keyboard with these very words — had all her formative years overlaid with Pat’s toughest years. When I was 4, the world changed. My dad died, and buried with him was a part of Pat. Deep inside, she wore sadness that stayed for the rest of her life.

She soldiered on and raised us kids and did everything she could in a world not really welcoming of single moms. My school life coincided with Pat’s getting a teaching certificate and becoming a teacher.

Whenever Pat was too tired, or overwhelmed, or sad, or busy, or just not able to answer all of my questions, she turfed me over to Nancy. Nancy always had answers for me.

Nancy taught me about books and how to process real from imagined. When I began voraciously reading any book in front of me, which included The Exorcist around age 12, she explained adult themes and horror.

I learned about art, philosophy, travel, theater, museums, and culture at her knee.

Nancy told me stories about my dad that no one else did. My mother couldn’t talk about him. I think it hurt too much. But Nancy told me about fun trips and how she, 12 years younger than Pat, loved hanging out with my mom and dad when they were dating. She told me one of my favorite things to hear about my dad — That he always loved novelty, trying gadgets when they came out or new foods. I see my DNA in that memory.

Nancy also taught me about love and family. As a pre-teen or teen or whatever hormonal nightmare age, I did something wrong. In my apology to her, I made it about myself and said something about it being OK if she hated me. In her anger at my shitty apology, she taught me two things, how to apologize empathetically and sincerely and that she loved me and you can make mistakes and still be loved.

As an adult, Nancy was a co-conspirator in wrangling my adult relationship with my mom. We checked in with each other, Nancy would call me when my mom was pissed off at me, and we’d strategize. Late in her life, Pat wasn’t doing great at taking care of herself, and so then we could strategize on keeping her going.

I learned from Nancy a great strategy of managing Pat that always worked. Pretend you needed her help, even if you didn’t.

I suspect that ALL of my childhood years when Nancy was there visiting, and the prevailing narrative was that my mother was making sure Nancy had a good meal or help with whatever, it was a sham. Nancy let my mother take care of her, and then take care of her and Ron, and then take care of her and her family, because Pat needed it, as much or more than Nancy needed the help.

They both had death and overwhelming loss in common. My mother’s husband, and my aunt’s son, Tommy, left wounds that never fully healed. They also both hid their wounds and soldiered on.

Yet, in the worst times and the best, they were a pretty hilarious and awesome duo. I recently told my cousin Ted about when our grandfather, their father, was in a nursing home. Nancy hated the ritual of signing in and signing out and thought it was particularly stupid, when week after week the people at the home recognized all visitors. You couldn’t leave unless you signed out, apparently a gesture to keep the residents in.

So, she would make up fake names.

One day, she and Pat visited, and she signed them in as Charlotte and Emily Brontë. But, then, she had to leave before my mother, running out without telling my mother their fake names.

In the end, after a lot of frustration, my mother had to beg to see the sign in sheet. They were able to verify that the Brontë sisters had not, in fact, visited anyone that day.

One of my favorite weeks since moving to California was when Nancy came to visit. Her presence and everything she shared was for me the closest thing to M. meeting my mother.

It was incredible to hear Nancy’s views on San Francisco — A Mecca she had read about and wanted to visit. We took her to City Lights, and walked around North Beach talking about the Beats. She bought a “Howl” cap and I think a Ferlinghetti book. We ate fresh strawberries that she declared the best she had ever had. We cruised by the Berkeley campus, where she quoted Mario Savio and talked about how much his speeches from the steps of Sproul Hall meant back in the day. And, bonus of bonuses, a naked man tipped his cap to us while we crossed Castro Street.

With some of my cousins, my sister, a friend, and me, Nancy marched on the Whitehouse in January 2017, alongside an army of pissed off women.

I write all of this down, because as a co-worker said to me this week, “aunts can be important and weirdly influential.” And, yes, this aunt to me is very very important and was weirdly and enormously influential.

Nancy called me today. She called from hospice back in Massachusetts thousands of miles away. She called to say goodbye. We shared words of love and an awkward conversation that no one is ever prepared to have. And then we hung up.

I really wish it was not goodbye. I really wish it was au revoir. I hope for peace in the end.

Finnegan’s wake without the whiskey

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I’d make a terrible anthropologist, I think. Rather than finding the unique and reportable, my thesis would be “people, right, yeah, pretty much the same.”

As the crow, or maybe a toucan or something tropical flies, I’m sitting just under 10,000 miles from my birthplace. All of the funerals I’ve attended have been in New England. The magic has been brought mostly by courtesy of your Roman Catholic holy and apostolic traditions, with the occasional Protestant mass for flavor.

This time around on another continent I was a newly minted family member, daughter-in-law and wife of the elder son. Just as with every service I’ve ever been, it all started with the family convergence, phone calls, the bustle of professional death handlers, friends, neighbors and relations. And in the ensuing afternoons and evenings, something like a party.

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I’m not James Joyce. And, I don’t speak Hokkien, Hainanese, Cantonese, Bahasa Malay or any other tongue piping up among the crowd. So I don’t have any stories to tell.

A bottle of whiskey wasn’t in the coffin. Nor was it stolen and sent around the crowd. No one evilly plotted a cannibal meal. And, no spare whiskey and beer were passed among the crowd.

Still and all, among the chaos, the scene was familiar. Old friends and extended family wandering in and out. Reminiscing about who was where when and what ever happened and how did everyone get so old. It was a wake, just the same as “visiting hours” in the U.S. Like in a not so distance past in my old neighborhood the guest of honor lay quietly among candles and prayers inside the house. And catered food and handshakes stayed up on the porch.

What a week, what a world

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There is absolutely too much to write about.

Saturday was a big bash. Along side local friends, some of my family and some particularly fabulous friends got into planes to celebrate with us. From different places on at least three continents and both the east and west coasts, a bunch of others tuned in to watch us actually do the “I dos.”

The week started on a high, and it ended on a low. Morgan’s mom, Leong Fik Yak, finished her stay on this mortal coil. She was a try gentle and warm soul. We are currently participating with more and different family on sending her off to celestial planes.

When my uncle died, Morgan experience for the first time how the Catholics say goodbye. Now, I am Margaret Mead, trying to stay out of the way, make the right motions and help however I can with the Buddhist way.

For now, my only observation is Catholics and Buddhists both have chants, bells and incense. There is time for old family, friends and associates to talk and remember and in remembering it’s part party with the guest of honor quietly in state.

Maybe I will sort out something wise and insightful about the human condition and death. For now, I’ll go with the flow.

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

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Ah the holidays. It doesn’t matter the decade, the age or the location, but I get that bluesy feeling that’s best summed up by The Animals or Nina Simone.

But oh, I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Of course, it’s all self-inflicted anxiety. One year maybe I’ll just not give two shits about whether the gifts I get are well-matched and well-received. Maybe I’ll just receive all gifts at face value and not morn the lack of connection.

(Truth be told, that’s one minor complaint at the end. There’s only one thing I received that I thought, “Really?” since it seemed so cookie cutter and impersonal.)

This year, though, was a new chapter. M. and I celebrated at home and hosted. California menu, no snow, fresh produce, avoiding travel all pluses all around.

I have to admit, I have more fun with M.’s family and Chinese New Year. Although, he points out that could be because many don’t speak English, the only language I do. I guess being misunderstood ain’t so bad, if it’s done in Chinese.

Holy! Holy! Holy! Final draft

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Here’s essentially the version that I read at Ron’s funeral. I was happy to be part of the celebration of a wonderful life, but I truly wish his time had not come. Amazing to know how loved he was, and I was a tiny planet in a good man’s orbit.

******

I really don’t know how to feel, so I did the only thing I ever learned to do. I wrote. Badly, maybe. Thoughtfully, possibly. With futility, definitely.

The closest I ever had to a father figure left this mortal coil. A true mensch, a sensitive soul, my uncle Ron died.

I thought about writing a euphemism for died, but for all the poets, madmen and philosophers seeking the truth, I couldn’t do it. Ron was the first person I ever met who talked about the Beats–Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs. For all of them, the word is death, and today it’s Ron’s word, too.

The thing I remember about Ron is that he was the first grown up that spoke to me like an adult. I remember real conversations, or rather they were very real to me. Given that I was about 6 years old and he was in his 20s, his mileage no doubt varied on what he got from the dialogs.

I dogeared and wore thin the pages of a picture book he gave me way back when, called “That Mean Man.” It was its non-treacly story and non-kiddie flavor that made it long a favorite after I was past picture books. It traveled to college and crisscrossed various moves. I regret not knowing where it landed.

When I heard the news, I went home to find a tiny gift I never gave Ron over the couple of Christmases we didn’t return East. I meant to give him a small badge from the Beat Museum in San Francisco. Long before I ever moved west, North Beach existed in my imagination. Ron’s love for books and the Beats taught me where City Lights Bookstore and the Condor club are, and I hoped that someday he’d visit and see for himself. I picked up the pins from the museum for Ron, proclaiming Ginsberg –“Holy! Holy! Holy!” and “Starving Hysterical Naked.” Now they will hold a place of remembrance on my desk.

Coincidentally, Nancy told me a story about my father and his influence on her as a kid that I thought I could have said about Ron. My father was someone who tried the new, bringing gadgets and food to Nancy’s Dorchester, a neighborhood not known for exploration. Ron was that to me in my suburban world. Nancy and Ron were my perception of the 60s and 70s counterculture.

Ron read books that raised eyebrows and listened to rock. He spoke to me and my siblings and his high school students like a real person, including innuendo and jokes. He admitted to having inhaled way before it was asked of presidential candidates. Ron was the adult who argued the virtues of “Exile on Main Street” and “Beggars Banquet” above all other Stones albums. He was jazz records and quoting postmodern analysis of just about anything. He was the babysitter not knowing how to handle an unruly brood of five letting my brothers smoke a novelty cigar. He was nerdy passion for books, art and music in equal measure to a passion for sports.

Ron and Nancy were Newbury Street in the 60s, urban life and walks in the Public Garden to feed the ducks after reading “Make Way for Ducklings.” I met my first hippies and interracial couples and a gay man through them. I tried new foods, like the exotic pita bread suddenly appearing on store shelves next to the Wonder Bread, and got to sip wine.

Ron was also after school adventures and schemes with Pat, my mother, as they both used their school teacher afternoons pretty well.

There is a part of the non-conformist me that I think I owe to both of them back in those afternoons. I learned about shy adults with passions bubbling under the surface. Early on I talked about writing with Ron, a closet writer who said his stuff wasn’t good enough to see the light of day. I am certain that he was wrong.

Perhaps most of all, Ron taunted a kind of affection and sensitivity in me, giving me the hugs that were not second nature in my family and speaking out loud about feelings. I modeled behavior that he showed and eventually I’ve gotten better. Ron and Nancy were the most couple-y couple in my world as a kid.

Now, I use their “take care” as a goodbye (which actually works pretty well in California.)

That’s all I have right now, and it’s not nearly enough. Maybe instead, I’ll just re-read Ginsberg, and remember a teacher who opened up my world and heart to the life I have now. Ron is Holy! Holy! Holy!

Holy, holy, holy

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I really don’t know how to feel, so I’m doing the only thing I ever learned to do. I’ll write. Badly, maybe. Thoughtfully, possibly. With futility, definitely.

Today the closest I ever had to a father figure left this mortal coil. A true mensch, a sensitive soul, my uncle Ron died today.

I thought about writing a euphemism for died, but for all the poets, madman and philosophers seeking the truth, I couldn’t do it. Ron was the first person I ever met who talked about the Beats, Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs. For all of them, the word is death, and today it’s Ron’s word, too.

The first thing I remember about Ron is that he was the first grown up that spoke to me like an adult. I remember real conversations, or rather they were very real to me. Given that I was about 6 years old and he was in his 20s, his mileage no doubt varied on what he got from the dialogs.

I dogeared and wore thin the pages of a picture book he gave me way back when.

That mean man, who shared his chicken pox but never his jelly beans, deserved his score of mean children who made him live unhappily ever after.

It was its non-treacly story and non-kiddie flavor that made it long a favorite after I was past picture books. The book traveled to college and crisscrossed various moves and apartments. I regret not knowing where it landed.

When I came home tonight, I pulled open drawers and scanned shelves to find a tiny gift I never gave Ron over the couple of Christmases we didn’t return east. I meant to give him a small badge from the Beat Museum, an earnest little storefront in the heart of North Beach.

Long before I ever moved near the San Francisco Bay, walked down Grant Ave. to Columbus and by Jack Kerouac Alley, North Beach existed in my imagination. Ron’s love for books and the Beats taught me where City Lights Bookstore and the Condor club are, and I hoped that someday he’d come out here on a visit and see for himself.

As a placeholder for that visit, I picked up the pins from the museum. “Holy! Holy! Holy!” and “Starving Hysterical Naked.” Now they will hold a place of remembrance on the bookshelf by my desk.

I want to say so much more. Ron was the adult who extolled the virtues of “Exile on Main Street” above all other Stones albums. He was jazz records and quoting postmodern analysis of just about anything. He was the babysitter not knowing how to handle an unruly brood of five letting my brothers smoke a novelty cigar. He was nerdy passion for books, art and music in equal measure to a passion for sports, even though a natural athlete he was not.

Coincidentally, my aunt, his wife, told me a story about my father and his influence on her as a kid that I thought I could have said about Ron. My father to Nancy was someone who tried the new, bringing gadgets and food and whatever to her Dorchester, a neighborhood not known for exploration. Ron was that to me in my suburban world.

He listened to rock and jazz and read books that raised eyebrows. He spoke to me and my siblings and his high school students like a real person, including innuendo and jokes. He admitted to having inhaled way before it was asked of presidential candidates.

Ron and my aunt Nancy were Newbury Street in the 60s, urban life and walks in the Public Garden to feed the ducks after reading “Make Way for Ducklings.” I met my first hippies and interracial couples and a gay man through them. I tried new foods, like the exotic pita bread suddenly appearing on store shelves next to the Wonder Bread.

I got to take a sip of wine and beer, and instead of soda was allowed sophisticated drink mixers like Squirt from the corner store.

Every perception I had as a kid in the sixties and early seventies was influenced by what seemed at the time a Ron and Nancy’s counterculture lifestyle to my mom’s post-war mainstream self.

Ron was also after school adventures and schemes with Pat, my mother, as they both used their school teacher afternoons pretty well.

There is a part of the non-conformist me that I think I owe to both of them back in those afternoons. I learned about shy adults with passions bubbling under the surface. Early on I talked about writing with Ron, a closet writer who said his stuff wasn’t good enough to see the light of day. I am sure that he was wrong.

Perhaps most of all, Ron taunted a kind of affection and sensitivity in me, giving me the hugs that were not second nature in my family and speaking out loud about feelings. I modeled behavior that he showed and eventually I’ve gotten better. Ron and Nancy were the most couple-y couple in my world as a kid.

Now, I use his “take care” as a goodbye (which actually works pretty well in California.)

That’s all I have right now, and it’s not nearly enough. Maybe instead, I’ll just re-read Ginsberg. Ron and everything are Holy! Holy! Holy!

Another year, another day to mention Pat's Day

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Ah, the Ides of March have come, and for me that means thinking about my dear old madre. She would have been 82, I do believe, if her stroll here on planet earth hadn’t ended.

For all times, I hope to celebrate my own memory of Pat by choosing to eschew the conventional. I hope I always pick the bright red bloomers and sassy bra over the pale pastels or floppy white cotton. If the woman taught me nothing more, it was to enough to know to have a little fun in the underwear world.

A friend back in Boston, who unlike myself actually gets stuff done every now and again including the Idatorod, is working out an idea. It’s a book compiling stories of embarrassment and tragi-comedy, called Mug of Woe. She sent me a note, so I sent her back a little bit of my embarrassing life. It got me thinking, and writing more again.

In a completely separate universe, metaphorically and literally, a friend in California had a party on Sunday afternoon featuring her favorite psychic. I wrote about Felix last year round about this same time.

Once again, he mystified my skeptical soul with shit I can’t explain. The dude says my dad is there and is showing him something about mowing the lawn. He even mimes the full body gesture of starting the old style gas motor, yanking on an imaginary rope. Felix asked if I understood why he would be mowing the lawn.

Everyone who knew my dad in 1968 would know what the lawnmower was all about; it’s essential information. My father was mowing the lawn when he suffered what would be a fatal heart attack.

But I ain’t writing about my dad today. Nope.

Felix the medium is chatting up my mom. He mentions something about frilly clothes, but it’s not clear to him, and it’s not clear to me. Frilly wasn’t Pat’s outwardly defining style.

Pat is showing him writing, my writing, and near as I can tell, she’s cool with my pathetic ambitions. I’m supposed to write, spirit mom, spirit Pat indicates, and she understands.

At this juncture, I feel like I need to explain a bit about writing to the assembled room, about what I’m trying (painfully and lazily and fitfully and occasionally happily) to get out on paper or electronic screen. I mention my writing about my relationship with Pat and the working title of “Burying My Mom in Leopard Print Undies.”

Felix is rolling with this interruption. I gather spirit mom is cool, too.

Then I tell them one of the stories about why that might be the working title of my book about our fucked up by largely functional mom-daughter relating. I give the Reader’s Digest condensed down version. The story, though, is the self-same one I had just sent off to my friend’s Mug of Woe project a scant week before this close encounter.

Way back in the dark, distant days of the 1970s, I went shopping with a junior high pal and her moms. It was that day that I learned Pat had a different sensibility than the hausfraus in our ‘burb.

When I dropped my drawers to try on some pants, my little buddy’s mom lost her mind. My 11-12 year old tush was swathed with black lace, the very lingerie Pat had given me the Christmas before. In fact, she had given my sister and me each matching boxed sets of undies feature red, black and white lace.

Seems my buddy’s mom found them unseemly. She didn’t believe me when I told her my mom gave me the black lace. In her, albeit cramped and tiny, universe, little girls wore white cotton, at best with a miniature pink satin rose marking the front from back.

Felix the medium jumped in somewhere at this point in my story telling. The voices over there had confirmed the frilly clothes reference with which he had begun. Pat was channeling in black lace.

Over the years, I came to appreciate Pat’s sense if underwear whimsy. It’s like regardless of the mood, weather or whatever shit is happening in your life, you can have a party down below, or underneath as it were.

My sister and I bought her a lovely matching set of leopard print bra and panties with improbable yellow lace to return the favor. Sadly, we bought it the day before a priest waved incense over her mortal form and we buried her next to my dad.

However, it was the quintessential out-of-step gesture she would have dug had she been there to see them. It’s the kind of quintessential out-of-step gesture that I think keeps me amused to this day, and in turn keeps me from looking the haggard 47 years that people assume I should look.

Tomorrow, undercover of some semi-respectable work clothes, I’m rocking red satin. Wherever you are, whatever you do, even in the tiniest gesture, it’s good to let your freak flag fly.

Pat taught me that.

Not writing and writing

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I guess it’s summertime and I’m busy going on adventures, like whitewater rafting, walking to the beach and barbecue. And, of course, there is my most recurring adventure, sitting on the couch and getting fat.

I’ve had some ideas for things to write here. I could write about the full on anxiety and trembling I felt whitewater rafting when the full force of my first experience on the Nile came back and I started feeling irrationally and overwhelming phobic. I could write about Dr.Laura and how I learned about her epic fail from a chat with a homeless dude named Larry in Berkeley.

I could write about my experience concocting an evening outing for work that turned into my own little amusing performance art piece in which with a little help from some friends I brought a crowd with some uptight and overeducated folks to a veritable hippie street party. I could write about the mundane, or maybe the way in which I still feel like an abused spouse in the workplace, even as I only get positive reinforcement in this job.

Or, I could do what I’ve been doing and not write.

For over a year, I’ve been naval gazing and hang wringing and other body part manipulating in a pretty unspectacular, boring cave of writer’s block. Someone asked me seriously, genuinely, strongly why do I write, or more why do I feel compelled to write. Further, he told me I didn’t have to write and I certainly didn’t have to validate myself through self-flagellation at a keyboard.

It struck home, and I haven’t gotten full on unstuck. Combine that with the sinking feeling that the books I loved as a little girl are a technology with a cloudy future. Being an author was never an easy row to hoe, now with the state of publishing it seems worse than dirt farming.

This week, or more last week, though, I was reminded by life one of the reasons I do want to write. Not to be all cliched and philosophical at the same time, but sharing stories is kind of what it’s always been about humanity wise.

A good friend, someone who I feel would have been a great friend had I not fled Boston, lost her mom. For the past year or so, she’s been keeping house and cooking meals and taking care of her mother however she needed. She emailed me a few days before when her mom was in a bad state after a stroke and then a series of strokes. The inevitable happened on Thursday.

Now, on the side of the country I left, she’s gone through the busy flurry of wakes and a funeral and having folks back to the house and making food and eating and storing food. No doubt, she’s functioning on autopilot and in the coming months she’ll feel intensely the change in the universe from not having to worry any more about her mother’s fragility and missing the place where her mother used to be.

I have the kernel of the idea about my mother, Pat, and me, and a few shallow chapters on my ‘puter, because story telling keeps us sane and keeps us knowing we aren’t alone. Not only would I get to exercise my demons by writing them down, but just maybe a reader would dig it and breath a little easier.

I can’t do anything to help my friend out but talk on the phone. I told her about my small smoking binge for the months that followed Pat’s funeral. It felt OK when she, having quit years ago, told me she and her brothers had been having a smoke on the stoop. For both of us, I think, there’s something cathartic in knowing someone else did the exact same thing.

The other day, I took a day off of work for no reason and with no plan. Ultimately, I wandered the aisles of Target and Daiso, a Japanese store with housewares and junk. It was relaxing to have absolutely no agenda. I came home with new underpants and various things for the house.

I laughed out loud in one department of a department store. A middle-aged woman and an older woman, crooked from osteoporosis, stood side by side in front of a shelf if empty bins. The older woman was examining a little plastic storage bin, carefully considering the possible purchase. The other woman, who really could only have been her daughter, questioned why she could possibly need it.

“You never can have enough storage, you know.”

The retort was quick and exasperated, “Yes, you can. Especially when you have no where to put it.”

I smiled a friendly head nod, as I passed by them in the aisle.

The dialog and its tone were so familiar, so comfortable. Among friends and strangers, I’m sensitive to all of the daughters and all of the mothers living through the last phase of their relationships. It’s a tough rite of passage, frustrating and rewarding.

On top of losing my mother, there are also a thousand ways in which I remember the Pat I did know and have in my life. I almost wrote on Twitter the other day that I can’t pass doll house furniture without quashing the urge to pick something up for her.

I wish now I could get some of her inspired and surprising creativity.

For example, I know she could help with another thing I could write about–a friend with breast cancer. She’s an unlikely friend, in that we’re not contemporaries (in fact she’s the same age as my uncle) and lives in Washington, DC. Still and all, we are long-distance coworkers who have swapped stories and realized some kinship, including strong-charactered mothers, and sharp, wicked senses of humor that have caused almost as much trouble as laughter.

As the contemporary of my aunt and uncle and from the generation about which Gail Collins writes, she’s straight up first generation feminist and solidly liberal. The pink ribbons, pink everything else and what Barbara Ehrenreich bitches about for its infantilism leaves her flat.

As does the notion that she should be a docile and placid patient, as opposed to the pugnacious fighter in her soul. I pity the poor oncologist or radiologist who doesn’t take the time to explain enough.

I want to send her something, especially post surgery and going into her second chemotherapy treatment, when she’s talking wig shopping and whether to go down to the army base for a $10 head shave from the barber there (apparently that’s a real option). If Pat were here, we could brainstorm. No doubt she’d come up with an off-the-wall scheme or some bizarre conglomeration of bargains and nonsense. Maybe she’d loan her a hat.

At gift-giving moments like this one, I always imagine the crazy, ragtag, assembled over weeks gift basket, which in my memories was colossally large, that Pat put together for a retiring colleague.

She didn’t leave behind blueprints for how to do such projects proud. I need those skills and those plans now, with one friend sick and another grieving.

At the same time, I need to remember all of the fights and frustration, big and small, with Pat or with life, including all of the many indignities she described as holding her back in life. If I remember the thousand things that made her great and the thousand things that made her troubled, i might have a story. I definitely would have a reason to not become complacent,

My life ain’t bad, But, somewhere there is still a gnawing. Maybe the words will escape some day, late to help my friends, but in time for some one else.

Very little from very high

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I wrote the following in the middle of the stratosphere on Tuesday night. Alas, no wifi on the plane, and i only just remembered to hit publish now.

******************************

As I grabbed my iPad and headed cross country, I promised myself I would write a little. Here I am, at the veritable end of my journey, writing just a little.

I just don’t have the writing mojo I used to have or thought I used to have or used to think I had. Sadly, reuniting with writerly friends did nothing to spur me on to feats of literary limping, as is my usual style.

To be fair, the friend who is part drinking buddy, part platonic soulmate who generally makes me feel more than I am and better for having tried than not to have done at all, was quite busy. You gotta forgive a guy for not indulging in deep, penetrating faux-intellectual self indulgence and midnight literary aspirations when he’s mid-nuptials.

On a complete side note, this wedding, his wedding to the soulmate who, I think, he really needs, was an end to an era. Many many many units of time and various locations ago, we somewhat boozily, single without romantic prospects and unsure if we wanted the entanglements of another relationship, promised ourselves to each other, provided the planets aligned and deemed it so.

The main condition was that he would have to hit 40, which, a decade my younger, is still years off for him, and by arithmetic I would be a ripe old 50. We would both have to be single without others on deck or in the wings or any other metaphoric closeness.

Of course, being as I moved across the whole of the United States to be with another guy, I arguably fired the first salvo in the dissolution of our pact. Not to mention, we’ve been as good as married for the past six years or so, cohabiting and all, albeit without the legal paperwork.

(Here’s another completely parenthetical, non sequitur diversion. I just had my bodily fluids churn and various muscles clench in fear in the middle of the stratosphere in the middle of this jet in the middle of a flight. I have never heard my name over the loud speaker, and I have never been asked to ring my call button. Until now.

Once I got over my instinctual panic for some kind of horrible announcement, I gave myself a quick frisk and realized my pocket was now unbuttoned. Yup, a new privilege of American Express membership. My name can be read off the card as it sits on the floor of the toilet of an airplane.)

It was a fun wedding especially in that I got to see some folks I rather like. But, I do admit, I’m not a fan of the wedding in general. I don’t know what is missing somewhere in my cerebral cortex, because I simultaneously understand and respect the ceremony, and I don’t.

Why the need for ritual and public promises? I totally get being with someone, and increasingly I now understand the legal rights marriage bestows. Hell, wedding rings even make sense to me, even though I resent their history of marking chicks as chattel.

I have performed publicly. I have performed publicly in a state of undress. I have performed publicly in a few U.S. states and one foreign country. Yet, the idea of standing up there and telling a crowd or even just a smattering of folks what they already know–namely that I planning on sticking with M.–is incompressibly frightening to me. Like stage fright with a soupçon of agoraphobia.

My friends did it twice, once in her home town and then again in his. I think I’d be weakly cowering in the corner if I ever have to do that.

Of course, my eldest brother outed my being the weak link to my uncle. As many might assume, he had thought it was M. who was the holdout. I think it’s a little bit of both of us ducking the party more than the commitment.

Romantically, on phones separated by 3,000 miles, M. suggested that maybe we’d have to do it if only to put the familial nagging on both sides and across two continents to rest.

Is nagging a valid reason? Probably as good as any, like my desire to have M. enforce a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, when my body has started to have enough of this world, or M.’s to have me chuck his ashes into the sea.

Then there’s the nice part of our togetherness and all. Who better to stay with than the one with whom you’ve made a happy life?

Meanwhile, while I pondered all of that, I got to see parts of my family and relics of my old surroundings. I’m not calling my family relics, we’re all getting older, but not that old.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to see the chunk of family or friends that are stressful. That’s another worry about a wedding. I imagine there is no elegant way to leave out people who’ve seen you as a bare ass naked baby, even if you would like to write on an invitation “only show up if you plan on not being too crazy or a total dick.”

I’m pretty sure Emily Post and Ms. Manners wouldn’t even waste the ink explaining why that ain’t done.

Then, there’s a whole other group of folks that I wouldn’t be able to send an invite to that read, “stay home and enjoy your own life, nothing to see here” to avoid their making a fuss or having to find an outfit or driving or getting a babysitter or having to leave the house at all on my account.

I have thrown good parties in the past and have made myself the center attention, but weddings seem so compulsory. They should be just as optional and more fun than when I used to let people get drunk on my back deck before watching July 4 fireworks from the Cambridge side of the River Charles. Has anyone ever felt that way about attending a wedding?

Better to keep it small. If only I can convince M. (and a passel of other people) that two might just be enough.

Coming home?

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I don’t have a house here. The places I have lived are now occupied by strangers, sold to the highest bidder. Still and all, I was Massachusetts born and bred.

And, now I’m back again. I’m lying in my nephew’s bed, a bed in which I have never slept. He’s away at school, just to clear up that we’re not the sort of family you see in newspapers, shaking your head and wondering how does that ever, ever happen. No, my nephew is safe, and I lack the predatory spirit.

I’ve never been in this bed, because punk ass little sister that I am, when I moved out of state I returned usually with M. in tow. My big sister got this room, while encoupled or ensconced as M. and I are, we got the bigger room, the veritable suite where my older nephew sleeps.

It doesn’t feel like home anymore. I think it’s because I am in a bed and a room in which I’ve never lain my head. Definitely not the familiar surroundings you hear the cliches drop as “home.” I am with family and very comfortable and grateful for their hospitality; it just ain’t home.

As if to greet me, Logan Airport had a special surprise as I landed in the old, hometown airport. I swear to fucking god on high and all of the saints and spirits, that I saw the meanest boy I ever dated on the escalators.

For a split second, I thought about shouting his name, in order to watch him turn his head in my direction. Then, as I rose up on my escalator and he sunk metaphorically and literally downward on his, I could flip him off. Perhaps a double-handed, two middle fingers raised salute with a lot of wagging and emphatic gesturing.

I opted for dignity and not ever engaging with him again and silently rode up the moving stairs.

I sometimes feel badly that I actually, without kidnapping or water boarding, dated him for so long. It’s hard to explain the mental illness to the very nice, polar opposite man and life I have now. There should be an acronym like “AA” for explaining a stage in a woman’s life when her ultimate choice was a bad one.

The acronym would also help provide the evidence that the hatred I feel is unusual but sane. I reserve it for one person. I’m pretty sure any other guy I dated I would have greeting across the escalators civilly. Hell, I later helped one get a job and then was a good colleague at work.

Best of all of seeing this ghost the moment I landed “home?” He was looking overweight, dumpy and old. A look wholly incompatible with the sun, lemon trees, boogie boarding, enjoyment having life I have now with M.